Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Light Painting with the PUMA

I just finished a long group project for my Intro to Robotics class and wanted to share the result.

We were using this 6 DoF PUMA robot arm with a multicolored LED at the end to create long exposure photographs (light paintings). The process wasn't perfect and we had a camera that tended to wash out the colors on some frames but I am very pleased with the result.

The Puma

The result is this rotating globe image drawn one frame at a time. Each frame took about 3 minutes to draw and a minute to process. If we had a lot more time we would have slowed down the rate of motion so that we didn't have so much jerking from the arm's inertia. Note that this is drawn on a 3D sphere, so you can see continents appear to float above the horizon a bit due to a trick of perspective.